Spotify is moving, sort of. Until now, the company has maintained its own data servers, leasing space near listeners so that it can stream music as quickly as desired. Now the company is saying goodbye to that approach and saying hello to the Google Cloud Platform.

Spotify views this as an opportunity to cut costs and save effort. Google's data platform lets the music streaming company focus on what it likes doing and leaving the boring system administration to someone else's engineers.

This move is not unlike Netflix's own recent move. Little more than a week ago, the company announced that it had fully migrated its product to Amazon Web Services. Though, it's worth pointing out that Amazon's product has significantly more market share.

Consolidation is good for business, but this transition does come with risks. Now a Google outage has the possibility of taking Spotify down with it, much like how Netflix is one of many sites that may go down whenever Amazon has issues, something that has happened before.

The Google Cloud Platform offers hosting on the same infrastructure Google uses for its own products. The company has remarkable uptime, but even its services are unavailable everynowandthen. That also makes Spotify one more thing you have to count on Google to deliver.

Spotify hasn't completed the transition just yet. Given the size of the company's backend, this could take quite some time.

If they used some of the Amazon-proprietary services like DynamoDB it might take a major re-engineering of their back end to move it away from AWS. One reason why I've tried to stay away from Amazon-proprietary services, we're using our own database servers rather than RDS for example...

AbbyZFresh

Amazon is WIIIDDDEEEE ahead of both google and microsoft in this battle. It's not even close.

Google mostly has small app companies on its platform. Amazon has the much larger businesses on its cloud platform.

Anne McCleary

❝my .friend's mate Is getting 98$. HOURLY. on the internet."....two days ago new McLaren. F1 bought after earning 18,512$,,,this was my previous month's paycheck ,and-a little over, 17k$ Last month .,3-5 h/r of work a days ..with extra open doors & weekly. paychecks.. it's realy the easiest work I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months ago and now making over 87$, p/h.Learn. More right Here!!b362➤➤➤➤➤ http://GlobalSuperEmploymentVacanciesReportsClear/GetPaid/98$hourly.... .❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:❦2:::::!!b362.....

Both are very large applications, with many compute instances, using cloud storage, large cloud sql databases (one of them is over 30 gb), very detailed setups. Paying nearly 800$ for aws, 400$ for google cloud. We are developing them for Macellan.net

30gb is what you consider a "large cloud sql database"? Wha?! I'm currently running several *terabytes* of SQL database in the Amazon cloud, and I don't consider our application to be "large" by Big Data standards. I do agree that AWS's pricing is not attractive (let's just say we're paying considerably more than your costs for a significantly larger constellation and leave it at that), but at the time we started, Google and Azure didn't have the services we needed (and believe me, I looked, I didn't want to be locked into AWS). Today we could probably save around 10% moving to Google, but frankly the cost of making that transition is more than it's worth to us right now.

That said, the cost of Google's cloud services is definitely looking attractive. At some point there's going to be a major refactoring of how we do things on our back end (in particular, some of the log-based data is going to go into a more classic Big Data database rather than SQL because there's just too much of it to be comfortable doing SQL queries on it), and yeah, Google might be something we look at seriously at that point.

It is a special case that ofcourse you can not just leave Amazon. By large I mean the comlexity of application, comparing to Spotify (we are commenting on a spotify article). So you don't consider Spotify as a large application... Anyway Google Cloud is the right choice for startups.

I know Azure has been winning a lot of ground lately (at least with people I have talked to), but AWS is currently the guerrilla to beat. Google keeps trying to push their platform but this is the first I have heard of any large players using it.

Spence1115

A lot of people I know are moving from Azure to AWS.

JeanClaude

Azure is appealing to small to medium enterprise business that run Windows stack mostly.

The company has remarkable uptime, but even its services are unavailable every now and then"

Do you have any evidence that any of the down time is related to Cloud Services? There can probably a thousand reasons why a service goes down.

Andy Roid

It doesn't claim that the downtime is related to Cloud Services. Just that if Google can't keep their own core products like Google Docs and Gmail up 100% of the time, you can't really expect GCS to be any different

Mikel Pr

obligatory no one can expect 100% uptime comment

Zsolt V

There are different levels of service guarantees for people who pay vs. free services. Presumably, Spotify is paying.

NinoBr0wn

It doesn't matter what is paid for or who is paying for it. The nature of the technology is susceptible to going down. That's the only point.

Rob Fetterhoff

If you expect anyone to be able to have 100% uptime you're only kidding yourself. It just doesn't happen.

Kevin

So now my Spotify music is now going be slow like it's on Google Play Music?

YaKillaCJ

GPM isn't slow at all. Maybe it's location or your service provider. For me tho, I click a song and it's playing in 1-3 seconds. Albums and Playlist of course don't have any pause between transitions. Comcast and TMobile here.

Kevin

1-3 seconds is a little too long don't you think? On Spotify the songs play as soon as you click on it.

YaKillaCJ

Umm what? 1sec is not a long time to download a 3-5 mb file. That is instant. Same speed as Spotify. I click it and it starts playing. Not to mention no connection times if it has it cached on your device.

But no matter to me, I don't do the cloud music much. Much prefer having it saved on my device without any drm

My1

maybe they can FINALLY add HTML5...

ASYOUTHIA

"The company has remarkable uptime, but even its services are unavailable every now and then. That also makes Spotify one more thing you have to count on Google to deliver."

So before the move, Spotify never went down? Their old way was so awesome that they didn't have to think about it going down??

ITguy

Precursor to Google eventually buying out Spotify. That is likely why they are leaving AWS. Spotify has never been profitable, has burned through tons of VC, has no real business model and no chance for success. Amazon buying Spotify makes little sense for Amazon as they can't really monetize it, plus they don't really need it since their Prime Music is already a major player. Google buying Spotify makes sense. Play Music hasn't exactly caught on (Google doesn't even talk about its user base or revenue) so they could add users. The purchase price would pretty much be just paying off the VC types. Google would inherit their users, record company/artist contracts, algorithms etc. and fold them into Play Music, to which the Spotify people would merely be able to transition to whether they are on Android or iOS (sorry Windows Mobile, but they still should be able to access it via the mobile browser client if I am correct). Spotify would then be able to actually make money for Google since it would be able to ride on top of their existing infrastructure instead of being solely self-supporting.

Only question is how long it will take. I say that Google will officially own both Twitter and Spotify by summer 2017. The DOJ won't get involved because there will be competition from Apple Music and Amazon Music on one hand, and of course the Facebook colossus on the other.

If Google kept its desktop client+all of its features (Spotify Connect especially) as well as GPM's superior offline and local track syncing (to this day, Spotify STILL doesn't display album pictures of local tracks, while GPM does this flawlessly, even for tracks not found on its database), I would not mind this change one bit at all. I like GPM much better anyways; I just use Spotify since I don't pay a dime for Premium, thanks to my job.